Camera pods are often employed on aircraft, and particularly on military aircraft, to provide the pilot and/or co-pilot with terrain views and for reconnaissance purposes. Such camera pods, while extremely useful for such purposes, are very expensive which prevents widespread deployment, and require significant amounts of maintenance as well as having their own power requirements and weight implications.
The lack of such widespread deployment means that many of the advantages of such camera pods cannot be enjoyed by the majority of personnel. For example, while flying at night, a pilot can be presented with an infrared view of the terrain below, assisting in the identification of terrain, landmarks and targets. Furthermore, mission traces can be presented to the pilot and/or co-pilot, which can be quickly correlated with what the pilot can actually see.
Furthermore, in joint-training of aircraft pilots and ground based personnel, it is extremely helpful to display, at ground-level, real-time footage from the point of view of the pilot. This allows the ground based personnel to see what the pilot sees, and to act and advise accordingly.
To date, such real-time footage has been achieved by way of a video stream between the aircraft (transmitting data from the camera pod) and the ground. However, such transmissions require high bandwidth communication links which are costly and whose effectiveness reduces with increasing transmission distance due to signal degradation. In addition, in poor weather conditions such video feeds may be of limited use due to low visibility of the terrain.